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Researchers at the UT Health Cancer Center

Research is an important part of the work we do at the UT Health San Antonio Cancer Center. As the only South Texas cancer center designated by the National Cancer Institute, our researchers are part of the global community of cancer researchers and our breakthroughs help patients in our local community and beyond.

The unifying theme of our research program is to understand the function and regulation of the multiprotein Mediator of transcription, and further clarify how Mediator dysfunction as a consequence of mutation or misexpression of its constituent subunits contributes to human disease. Mediator is a conserved multisubunit signal-processor through which regulatory information conveyed by gene-specific transcription factors is transduced to RNA polymerase II.

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program is the home for High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure, large data storage, bioinformatics expertise, and interdisciplinary research experience to manage and distribute complex genomic data sets, to develop and perform bioinformatics tasks, machine learning techniques, and systems biology using genomic data.

Dr. Tim Huang's lab has been conducting epigenetic/genetic analyses of cancer for the last twenty nine years and has pioneered the development of high-throughput microarray and next-generation sequencing technologies for integrative analysis of cancer genomes. These omics approaches are used in combination with statistical and bioinformatic tools to develop biological models of tumor progression.

Over the past 25 years, I have been directly responsible for the pathological analyses of all animals studied in multiple Program Projects and the San Antonio Nathan Shock Aging Center. In addition to pathological analyses of aging animals, I also have multiple research projects that seek the underlying mechanisms of aging.

Our research is focused is on molecular mechanisms that control fungal pathogenesis with an emphasis on Candida species, the 4th leading cause of hospital-acquired bloodstream infections in the U.S. A wide variety of immunocompromised individuals, including cancer patients, organ transplant recipients and AIDS patients, are susceptible to infection.

Dr. Leadbetter's laboratory has two long term research goals, to thoroughly investigate the mechanisims and nature of cooperation between iNK T and B cells during responses to model and bacterial lipid antigens and to texnted these findings to inform the development of a new family of lipid based vaccine candidates.

My research has primarily focused on studying the role of innate immune sensing and signaling of self- and nonself-nucleic acids (RNA/DNA) in host defense and inflammation. Understanding the fundamental mechanisms of immune sensing and signaling of nucleic acids is of great biomedical importance since defects in and dysregulation of this pathway have been implicated in numerous human diseases including autoimmune or allergic conditions, cancers and infectious diseases.

All cellular functions, activities, and communications are mediated by protein interactions. Despite their crucial importance, we know relatively little about many of these interactions due in large part to experimental limitations of structural biology. The central theme of the Libich Lab revolves around the determination of the structure and elucidation of the molecular mechanisms of highly dynamic and transient protein interactions.

The long term goal of the Mooberry laboratory is to identify new drugs for the treatment of adult and pediatric cancers. We screen diverse natural product extract libraries from the Cichewicz laboratory at the University of Oklahoma and the National Cancer Institute and use bioassay-guided fractionation with our chemistry collaborators at these institutions to identify the active constituents. We are also evaluating natural product-derived compounds or natural product inspired compounds from a number of other collaborators for activities that predict anticancer effects.

My research program focuses on elucidating mechanisms for cancer cells and sensory neuron interactions in mediating pain as well as tumorigenesis. Specifically, our research investigates the contribution of oral cancer cells in regulating sensory nerve terminals at the site of tumor growth leading to cancer-induced pain and studying the mechanisms underlying this communication. Additionally, we are also exploring the involvement of sensory neurons in regulating oral tumor development and progression.

Human nuclear receptors (NRs) are a family of 48 transcription factors that play critical roles in many diseases including cancer. Published studies implicated few NRs such as estrogen receptor (ER), androgen receptor (AR) in cancer progression and drugs targeting ER and AR are widely used for treating cancer. However, therapy resistance occurs over a period of time to these therapies and is a significant clinical problem.

I have 12 years of experience conducting research using electronic medical records (EMR). I am the PI on two NIH funded studies that assessed health outcomes in nationwide veterans with type 2 diabetes. I also contributed to analyses of numerous studies involving EMR from VA and Department of Defense. I have developed the expertise in data validation, handing missing data, modeling of comorbidities and heterogeneity and causal modeling for longitudinal observational studies.

The research in my lab is focused on understanding adult and pediatric cancers through deep mining of genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data sets. Our broad aim is to (1) characterize genes and pathways underlying cancer initiation and progression (2) predict tumor responses to therapeutic interventions based on their genomic profiles (3) integrative analysis of proteomic and genomic datasets (4) develop new methods and pipelines to leverage massive datasets in the public domain and address relevant questions in the field.

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